Preseason college football polls are flawed, unnecessary

AP PhotoEven Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly is having trouble figuring out why his team was ranked #16

The opening weekend of college football was a bit of a let down.

Michigan State played an excellent second half after sleep-walking through the first 30 minutes against Youngstown State. Michigan's defense looked pretty porous early, but made big plays to make up for it. Of course, the Wolverines didn't even get to play a full game.

Then there were the blowouts.

Wisconsin throttling UNLV while scoring more points on the football field than the Badgers do on the basketball court.

Ohio State blanking Akron. You could really tell those suspensions hurt the Buckeyes.

Virginia Tech scoring 66 against Appalachian State. Why would any school schedule a cupcake like that, knowing how badly that little school will get destroyed? It's not even a good enough game to test your backups. Wait . . . what? Really?!? Oh, never mind.

On the other side of the coin, you certainly don't want to be a team with expectations whole loses to a supposed lesser team to start the season. Auburn almost fell prey to that when they needed a late fourth quarter miracle to beat Utah State at home.

It was even worse for Notre Dame, who saw their season of expectations get pelted by rain and a South Florida team led by the son of their former coach Lou Holtz.

That's considered the biggest upset of the weekend, but my question is, who says it's an upset?

The Fighting Irish constantly get overrated because of their legacy. Their annual recruiting classes get a boost because anyone who is being pursued by Notre Dame must be a blue-chip player, so their rankings go higher. If they keep getting all these great classes, they must be pretty good. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

Maybe ND is not nearly as good as people think, and maybe USF deserves to be considered one of the top teams in the country. We won't know until the season plays itself out at least a little bit.

Which brings us to the real problem here. Preseason rankings are a complete joke.

It is obvious that their real purpose is NOT to be accurate. Compare any preseason top 25 to the end of the season poll and it will look like hey came from different planets. The last team sitting atop the preseason rankings that actually won the national championship was Southern California in 2004. In case you haven't heard, they got into a little bit of trouble for cheating that year and the title was vacated. Now you have to go all the way back to Florida State in 1999 for the last time it happened. The kids playing for this year's crown were in elementary school back then.

I have come to the conclusion that there are two reason why the preseason polls exist:

So the Associated Press, USA Today and the American Football Coaches' Association can get mentioned as we all ramp up to football season.

So television programmers don't have to know a damn thing about football to decide what games they want to air and how to promote them.

None of us football fans had to be told that the Louisiana State-Oregon match-up was going to feature a couple top teams and might be worth watching. Had the little numbers not been next to their name, would it have made you less likely to watch?

Of course not.

But having those numbers there gave the folks inside the magic box more ammunition to promote the game. All they had to say was "Three versus Four" and open the barn gates. If South Florida also would have had a little number next to their name, imagine how much more NBC could have hyped that tilt against the Irish!

You will never hear me say the Bowl Championship Series gets anything right except in this one case. They will not release their initial BCS rankings until October 16 when teams are already a couple games into their conference schedule, and the Irish have had a chance to completely fall apart a couple times to make the Peacock Network executives wonder why they keep putting them on TV.

I would say preseason polls are meaningless, but that is unfortunately not the case. It is next to impossible for a team to come from nowhere and have a realistic shot at playing for the national championship. The journey to pass up teams in front of you in the polls is precarious at best.

On the other side, once you're listed in the upper echelon of the polls, whether or not you deserve to be there, it takes forever for you to drop down. Unless of course you're a school from a non-major conference, then all it takes is a hiccup.

The polling system is flawed, it always will be. There will never be any way to ensure that the writer who is voting actually saw more than a couple highlights, and there is no way to make sure that a coach is filling out the sheet himself instead of handing it to some grad assistant. However, trying to determine who the best 25 teams in the country will be before ever seeing a single play turns a flawed system into a mockery.

Even if the polls would not be released until after week one, it would at least make a little sense. It's time for these voting bodies to realize the damage their preseason polls may be causing, and do the right thing by delaying them until teams have hit someone wearing a different color jersey at least once.